Marketers Recognize the Importance of Investing in Sour Economic Times-BusinessWeek

Association Of National Advertisers Conference '08: That Giddy Grim Feeling
Posted by: on October 17

Around 1,000 heavies in the ad biz—chief marketing officers, top sales execs at places like Google and Yahoo, magazine publishers, ad agency types—gathered in Orlando yesterday for this year’s Association of National Advertisers conference, and the lovely Florida weather contrasted rather sharply with the grim economic outlook taking shape.

...

Hewlett Packard’s Chief Marketing Officer Michael Mendenhall, in a morning presentation, spoke at length about the emerging global digital conversation—a familiar topic he spiced up with some interesting current factoids. (To borrow one: 76% of Brazilians who are on the Internet use a social network, and over half of these social network users check in with one every day.) In an effort to define the digital playing field—another familiar topic updated with an au courant example—he mentioned Ashley Qualls, an American teenager who’s built a formidable business from a Web site offering ways to spruce up MySpace pages.

Mendenhall said Qualls’ site gets 1.2 million unique visitors a month—a total, he said, that exceeds the combined traffic of the Web sites associated with teen magazines CosmoGirl and Teen Vogue.